Hello,

why do you not just print the result? like in print "DEBUG \$value is: [$value]\n";
Do the same for the other value so you'll be sure of the content of them. Remember that is possible the returned value is a multiline string, which probaly is not exactly a 'numeric value' (see qx at Quote like Operators).

Having done the above you can grab the numeric part with a regex (multiline switch?) and do te equality test:

if ($num1 eq $num2){
   ...
}
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HtH
L*
UPDATE: If the command return an error it is probably sent to STDERR that is not affected by qx operator. See the yet mentioned doc to see how workaround that issue. You must first check if the command executed correctly: perlvars contains infos about error variables, anyway try something like

  perl -e "$ret = qx/error_returning_command/;print qq([$ret] [$^E] [$
+{^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}])"
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to see what your commands return.